A secret plot to replace Romney? Let's hope so

Chris Christie with Mitt Romney: Just for the fun of it, imagine a last-minute switcheroo.

If I were a conspiracy theorist, I’d think this was a covert action by secret forces who are trying to replace Mitt Romney at the top of the Republican ticket.

I’m talking about what Rick Gorka said the other day. Gorka, who is Mitt Romney’s traveling press secretary, was caught on camera telling reporters to reporters to “kiss my ass” as they tried to ask the candidate questions during an appearance in Poland.

The subsequent news reports highlighted two things that became evident about the candidate since he embarked on his European tour: Romney’s no good at answering questions. And he’s no good at dodging them either.

That sort of thing doesn’t happen by accident – at least not if you’re a conspiracy buff. I suspect some other leading Republican inserted a mole on Romney’s staff. The idea was to discredit him before the party’s convention so that the delegates would decide to switch their support to some candidate who actually has a clue how to run a campaign.

That’s not unprecedented. Back in 1968, the “Dump the Hump” movement almost spared the Democratic Party from Hubert Humphrey.

But who would replace Romney? Here, the plot thickens. As it happens Gorka is very close to a certain governor who is perhaps the most popular Republican on the national scene.

Gorka was until recently the spokesman for the New Jersey Republican Committee. That was a role in which he often acted as a de facto spokesman for Christie himself.

Suppose Christie had sent him off to sabotage Romney? There’s still time for a “Draft Christie” campaign to emerge before the GOP convention later this month in Tampa.

Any conspiracy needs more than one conspirator, of course. So I put in a call to another likely suspect. That would be Donald Sico, a political consultant from South Jersey who began the first “Draft Christie” movement.

That was way back in October of 2010. Sico, a longtime GOP operative of some political insight, started the movement after he concluded the front-runner in the field was weak in one of the most contentious issues in the campaign.
“I respect Mitt Romney, but Obamacare is the illegitimate child of his Massachusetts health reform experiment,” he wrote on his “Draft Christie” website.
He certainly got that right. Of all the Republican politicos in America, Romney is the only one who can’t attack Obamacare. That’s yet another reason to engineer a Chris-for-Mitt Switcheroo. Perhaps, I suggested, Sico was helping to plan a Christie coup.
Nope, he said. Sico’s predicting Romney will win the general election. The issue of his role in creating what a primary opponent termed “Obamneycare” won’t hurt him, Sico said.
“If it was a normal election, I think it would overcome him and he’d lose,” he said. “But the economy is so bad that it’s just overwhelming.”

Romney will win, Sico said, as long as he focuses on the economy and shuts up about everything else.

“He needs to spend the last 60 to 75 days just talking about the economy,” said Sico. “If he’s asked about Israel or any other issue, if he can’t tie the question back to the economy, he should just ignore it and get back on message.”

Sico referred to this talent as being “McGreevey-disciplined.” He got that right. During Jim McGreevey’s two campaigns for governor I spent hours asking him tough questions. No luck. Ask McGreevey about the sky and he’d answer about the ground. Ask him about the sea and he’d answer about a river.

As for Romney, he seems to say the first thing that pops into his head. You can get away with that if you’ve got the force of personality to bluster your way through - like a certain governor. But when it comes to personality, Romney’s got a problem: He doesn’t seem to have one.

Of course, there’s always the hope that Romney has hired some top-notch advisers to tell him how to keep on-message. But then you come up against the fact that one of those advisers is Gorka.

So I sure hope someone’s conspiring to pull a switcheroo. But then I invoke the Golden Rule of Conspiracy Theories: Never explain by conspiracy what you can explain by incompetence.

Barack Obama’s standing in the FiveThirtyEight forecast reached its strongest position to date on Tuesday as a result of favorable polls in a set of swing states. The forecast model now gives Mr. Obama a 70.8 percent chance of winning the Electoral College, up from 69.0 percent on Monday and from 65.0 percent last Tuesday.

COMMENTS: Please no Moron Perspectives. If you are the sort of person who perceives criticism of a Republican as an endorsment of a Democrat, then this entire blog is over your head.
Also, I'm not particularly interested in comments about how the reporters deserved this because they were hounding Romney. It is the job of reporters to hound politicians. When they fail to do so, criticize them, but not when they do their jobs.
And it is the job of guys like Gorka to try and mollify the press even as he denies them access to the politician. In other words, he's supposed to kiss their ass; not the other way around.
There's an old political axiom that the flak should never become the story. He violated it.